Appetence
by lifeundecided
Summary: The house is quiet, creaking and groaning, like a restless sleeper, who rolls and groans in the way bellows compress, lungs and throat forcing the sound out from an unwitting mouth.


_Author's note: This is less of a story, more of a breather from AU. I'm currently writing another canon one-shot that should be about this length, which should only take me another week or so. Thank you for reading! Also, the book reference is Fahrenheit 451. _

Sometimes she still plays Scrabble with a dictionary, ammunition for grudge matches, learning strategy, like war, or like chess. The bag empties, and the board is more off-white than sea green, where she dropped the alphabet like atom bombs, triple word score. She allows herself half a smile, because there's no one to see it. She plays all four sides of the board: bets on port, starboard, bow or stern, and when she loses she considers burning the board. And then she reminds herself that any decent captain goes down with their ship. Seems a shame to waste a board. So she slits her wrists or partakes in another equally artistic, poetic death she wishes she could have had the first time around.

Blood swirling through an antique bath tub of tepid water is slightly more Sylvia Plath, less Elvis Presley. Despite the surroundings.

Or she plays slowly, days stretching into weeks, long enough that she can forget she's the only one playing. She thinks Hayden fucks with the board when she leaves it too long, because no matter how bored she was with a game she'd never use C-U-N-T. Too few letters. Not a single red or blue springboard sprung.

The attic's off limits because she couldn't bear Beau's disappointed expression every time she told him she wouldn't play. There's a lock on her bedroom door which keeps most of the lucid ones out, and a mumbled "go away" takes care of Nora when she comes asking for her baby, or the nurses when they come asking for sympathy.

She's emotionless and world weary and lonely in as few words as possible. A decade of hauntings and close encounters and she's still wilfully blind because she's tired. It's not just her room but his although he never shows his face. He's still dangerous, still crowded, still full of black and deep desires that would have once burned her star out in a supernova. But the star is dead and space is cold and quiet.

When the house is empty life is slow and it's easier to surrender to melancholy that way. Moira told her that time doesn't mean the same thing to ghosts so she's teaching herself oblivion, going still and appearing in the upstairs bathtub hours later, stomach empty and skin drenched and dazed.

She can hear his voice echo off the tiles and the porcelain; she's learned how to stop tears and slow her heart and let herself drown in the waves of her subconscious. She likes dying because at night she hears sobs that aren't hers.

She spends days on the cold floorboards tracing knots in the wood, ear pressed to the floor, catching snippets of whatever recycled gossip Chad can regurgitate today.

There's talk of turning the house into some sort of gentleman's club, and Violet wonders why she's never tried a cigar. She's quick, sniffs out a decanter of whisky that Chad bought from an antique store for a week's paycheck and Patrick threatened to smash when he saw the receipt. The whisky is only twelve years old, and doesn't do the crystal justice. But then the ethanol hits her like a sledge hammer and she falls down the stairs. She'll have to buy him a new decanter at Halloween.

She winds up with glass in her hair and her mother, glassy eyed, cellist's fingers working through it, picking out and plinking down the pretty shards that shine and tear her fingers apart. She walks away sucking on them and whimpering. She sounds more like a baby than the baby does.

Her mother is Nora mark two. She hasn't seen her of them in two years. She supposes that even the catatonic react to sound stimulus.

There's some glass in her eye, she thinks, because she can see red and smell blood and her motor control is well below par. Her arm is sliced almost from wrist to elbow and it's soaking into her shirt. Her tank top below it is turning from white to red. She thinks one leg is broken, possibly a wrist.

She was six years old when she broke her collar bone in a friend's back yard, determined to reach a bird's nest the other little girls were too chicken to climb for, stretch for, fall and break a bone for. The nurse said she was brave for not crying. She still won't cry.

She'd like to wait it out, die in peace, not answer to Chad's screeching accusations. Yes, she knows how much it's worth. He's told the story ten times with heavy eyelids and a heavy tongue, words falling out of his lax mouth to waft in her face like the stench of cheap red wine. It's around then he starts stroking her hair and telling her how much he wanted a little girl. He cries into his wine and sometimes she has to break a finger or two to get away. Even in sleep his grip's too tight to pull out of.

Dying gets easier every time; now it's just dull resignation, very little thrill, practical and simple, a quick fix.

But the fall hasn't knocked all of the alcohol out of her system; she giggles and gurgles, vomit trapped in her esophagus. Sign of brain damage. She thinks about the other signs, blown pupils, wondering whether her irises have been swallowed up in blackness.

Before she succumbs to unconsciousness, to inevitable death, she considers the fact that black eyes don't mean what they used to any more.

The house next door has a hearse on the curb and Violet thinks it odd that Constance is throwing Michael's latest nanny a funeral. They're tissue paper women. The thought makes her pick up that book, the one she hasn't read in years. Makes her skip to the part about poetic, symbolic spacial awareness. How you can notice another's presence just from the temperature of the air, the ghost of a whisper of a breath.

The sun set four minutes ago, because she timed it. Tomorrow is midwinter and she hasn't seen snow in a decade. It would be nice to have snow for a funeral, white flakes on black clothes, biting cold reminding people why they're there, Arctic winds swirling around people's ankles, between pews, goosebumps raised at tales of rapture and retribution, bleak fulfilment of duty: pull out your Sunday best soul.

If she had a funeral it would be back in Boston where her grandmother could make sure she had a real Irish Father and a polished coffin and a pretty quote on her gravestone. Her friends would leave half smoked cigarettes and dead flowers, sacrificial lambs to the goddess of teen angst.

Maybe her grandmother is dead now and maybe her friends are post-grads or baby momma's.

She watches the solemn affair from the window and sees a blond boy wipe his eye. There's no Constance. He'd never cry for a nanny. He'd never cry for his grandmother, either, but it's less acceptable to be stoic in the face of the corpse of the woman who raised you. Constance is in the box and if this was a movie then all the ghosts of the house would raise a cheer.

Michael is a promising runner, like his father. She wonders where he'll go, now there's no surrogate for him to leech the life out of. Maybe he'll run until there's no horizon left to reach and drop off the edge of the world and fall like Lucifer. Maybe he'll open the gates of hell like a twisted version of the Messiah and they'll escape purgatory. Maybe she won't be forced to live out a lonely eternity a hair's breadth away from temptation.

Tate can't hide the way he used to, because she's started looking for him, searching for a shift in the air that tells her he's close enough to touch, close enough that she should be able to feel his breath. She always left the windows open, hoping a breeze would obscure the sound. It never did and his even breaths lulled her to sleep even when she didn't want them to.

She lifts the latch, waves to Michael, lights a cigarette, takes a puff, contemplates jumping out to see how good the boy's self control is, how fast he can cover up the widening of eyes or the involuntary gasp.

His father's standing by the door when she holds the cigarette out to him, arm twisted, too engrossed in the boy's performance to face the demon with hollowed cheeks and closed eyes, who shatters the illusion by coughing a little. She heard him complaining to himself about how long it had been since he last had a smoke and she burned all the packets in the house. That was a little over a year ago and her stash hasn't been found yet. Nobody expects to find a pack of Marlboros stuffed down a skeleton's shirt. She wraps them in plastic to stave off the damp and sometimes gives Chad a drag in exchange for a secret.

"Your mother's dead."

He'll play it cool and hide the hope in his eyes and maybe he'll ask if she forgives him in an offhand sort of manner.

"She's not my mother."

"Maybe I was talking about Nora."

He's stumped. He's at her back, smoke stirring her hair, creeping its way into her lungs. She turns, quickly, fast enough to see him flinch away from her, recoil and snap back, pretend he's not walking on eggshells.

"Kiss me."

"What?"

"I said kiss me."

His hands are tentative, feigning innocence, uncertainty. He's brushing her hair back from her face when her eyelids flutter and she acts too because she's got plans. Her hand is on his arm, head tipped back, his fingers under her chin, soft and slow and familiar.

Everything ends with lust, his uncontrollable impulse and her fixation. She wants to run from him and know that he'll keep chasing her, with no hope of reward, just blind adoration that she can scorn and mock and secretly be thankful for. Suicide is boring and she thinks a compromise wouldn't be much of a sacrifice on her part. She wants him to let her be as self serving as she wants to be. She wants him to suffer, at least a little.

His tongue invades her mouth and she sighs. She bites down, hard, and he disappears with a string of clumsy profanities and an impressive spurt of blood.

...

She likes to watch Chad and Patrick fight because the blond suits a little colour in his cheeks and Chad never looks happier. It's unclear, exactly, what they're fighting about, because Chad is a little less with it than he lets on. He'll stop midsentence, look like he's going to throw something, spit out a word or two and crumple. When Patrick picks him up from the floor he'll hit at him, a useless endeavour, since his chest is both rock hard and hollow. She knows he's heartless because of the multiple times he's sucked off her father and made no secret of it. Or before his hands even touch a zipper he'll whisper Chad's name, smirk around whatever dick's between his teeth when he hears things start to smash.

But it's like a movie, when the anger fades to something a thousand times more broken looking and the characters kiss and the screen goes dark.

This tape keeps rolling. If she's very quiet Chad will let her watch because one bitch to another she's desperate for some new material. She had never seen it like this before, where there are no soft sighs or heated eye contact, and she wondered how often Chad is bottom, if he likes it better, if he does it out of love or an upside down bizarre kind of need for control.

She never expected it to look like this.

When they're both still, Patrick's eyes heavy lidded, he returns the favour in a way Chad has ever only described as gourmet. She told him he was lucky and poured him another glass of wine spiked with more than a few sleeping pills. She's kind of always wanted to know what it would be like to get a blow job, if it's the same ballpark for his and hers' genitalia.

Violet doesn't remember what it feels like, only the burning waves of shame and childish embarrassment, reluctant and uncooperative with knees clamped together like magnets.

They're both asleep, picture perfect, hair tousled, sickeningly content. There's a fireplace poker in her hand that won't be there for long. She's eyeing him up - Patrick - wondering how much room for manoeuvre she really has, how much force is required, how many times they'll kill her together before they get sick of her laughter.

It's the male peacock with the brilliant feathers, so maybe the analogy is a little skewed, but she's peacocking anyway, peacunting, doing something to catch his attention and put an end to the silent treatment. He's petulant and surly, all furrowed brows and perpetually turned back. She doesn't regret it because there's a part of her that wants to kiss him under the gazebo and smoke cigarettes and talk music, but that's overshadowed by the part of her that stomps across her cerebrum in black boots and tells her to burn the house down and let him fuck her in the flames.

Patrick screams like a girl and leaves droplets of blood on the carpet but all she can think about is how Moira won't appreciate the stains.

On paper the house is owned by a silver fox Hugh Hefner wannabe, who waltzes around in cream suits and a swirl of cigar smoke, assessing the latest damage. He used to think it was just vandals, but then he boarded up the windows and no entryway's been breached since. He thinks they're getting in through the crawl space, considers having it filled. Violet wonders if they'd be able to identify her body after all this time. There's nobody to claim it, throw her a funeral. There are no teeth, because there's no skull. She thinks the Black Dahlia's been playing Hamlet.

That man is on the phone talking to contractors, bustling around in the study, lamenting the fact there's no internet, hot water, air conditioning. She schedules a bath in the next week or so and pointedly ignores the fact that the outside world is barging in.

The builders who arrive to fit industrial burners and ovens, fix windows and sagging stairs, have an apprentice or two who don't look over seventeen. She's technically an older woman. Renovation is a spectator sport, a distraction from the shadow that dogs her steps, but she's goading him and once more, he's doing nothing about it.

When the sun sets he stands vigil at the bottom of her bed, waiting for her to notice him, the hope of an apology written on his face. She pretends not to notice him, keeps on reading her bright backwards book. She makes him sweat it out, flicks her eyes up, raises an eyebrow.

"Cat got your tongue?"

"This is bullshit and you know it."

"What? Did I hurt your feelings?"

There's a cracking sound she thinks is her skull under the weight of a brick.

He stands over her, whispers "Yeah." and leaves her to twitch her way to oblivion.

Coming to is worse than usual, maybe because there was no mental preparation, no bored resignation that suicide's the only option not exhausted in her mental self help library. She's been crying for hours and she's not sure why. It's like a child staring at themselves in the mirror as they cry, fascinated by the salt water and blotchy skin combination that reminds them to be sad. They radiate self pity and reflect it back on to themselves, taking comfort in the fact that at least their reflection understands, when no one else does.

"Why are you crying."

There's no inflection, just the empty voice that reminds her of meaningless violence, devoid even of pathetic rationalisations of boredom or enjoyment.

I'm sad.

All she has to do is open her mouth and say it, parrot the conversation that was never really conversation but a fountain of well meaning lies, but she can't.

"I want to die."

"You're dead."

"No. I want to _die_."

"Don't we all."

"Not you."

"No."

"Why?"

"I deserve this. You're... my penance."

"I don't want to be your penance."

He has the audacity to look bored.

...

There's a cigarette in her hand, and when she hears the scream the butt sizzles against her fire hazard nylon tights, melted in a perfect circle.

She can smell some kind of meat cooking in the kitchen, guesses it's not dinner, guesses correctly. The smell of burning hair could really turn someone off their food. It's most likely Lorraine on another midnight loop around the house.

But the scream pierces the air again, sounding familiar. That's when she finds Tate wielding a match, a bottle of vodka, eyes vacant, watching Vivien's skin char and melt. The catatonic also respond to pain and temperatures above 200 degrees.

They're watching her mother's corpse burn on the black and white tiles, and the parallels between the funeral pyre and beach bonfire aren't lost on her.

It's not exactly a romantic setting, not anymore, even though she always hated the word romantic because acknowledging the fact that she's ever felt anything akin to affection makes her skin crawl. But it's close enough to stir memories of hands that fumbled just enough to convince her that he was just as nervous as she was, just a boy hopped up on meds that stopped him wanting to wring her neck, stopped him acceding to her pleading eyes and grasping hands.

She leaves because she's seen her mother's body burn so many times in her dreams it does nothing for her anymore.

The next day her father shouts and stomps around the house with a baseball bat pulled roughly from the red shirted twin. She finds her so called baby brother hanging by his tiny ankle from the chandelier, stifles a laugh.

She later finds her father with a shovel through his stomach on the gazebo. She takes a knife from the kitchen table and plans to pry open his chest. She finds his rib cage cracked open, heart missing.

Lorraine seems to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West when trapped by the sprinkler system.

Travis mows the lawn, laments his face. She proposes killing himself to get rid of the razor blade scars that look like a clown's mask.

She finds Nora sobbing over a light fixture that's been ground almost to dust. Violet gets her a glass of water and watches the woman's throat come apart in hidden shards of original Tiffany glass.

Hayden gets drowned in the downstairs toilet.

The Black Dahlia gets her face shoved through the television screen.

She thinks he's stepping up his game, for her, winning her over in a way that suits what she's become, not what she wants to be. She wants and wants and yearns and wants and paces and plays chess and wants. Him. Tate. School shooter, murderer, rapist, pathological liar, manipulator, psychopath. He gets it and she doesn't know if she likes how easily she can relate to a monster like him.

That's why she sent him away, the first time. Out of a paper thin sense of obligation to her mother, and fear. That's why she killed herself, the first time. The lights are on in her mother's head but no one's home. There's really no reason to hide, not anymore.

She's a dead girl with a life sentence in a tomb that calls itself a house, and happiness is hard to find in the things that used to make her world go round.


End file.
